KJV Errors in the Book of Mormon
The claim:
"What are 1769 King James Version edition errors doing in the Book of Mormon? A purported ancient text? Errors which are unique to the 1769 edition that Joseph Smith owned?"[1]
"When King James translators were translating the KJV Bible between 1604 and 1611, they would occasionally put in their own words into the text to make the English more readable. We know exactly what these words are because they're italicized in the KJV Bible. What are these 17th century italicized words doing in the Book of Mormon? Word for word?"[2]
"The Book of Mormon includes mistranslated biblical passages that were later changed in Joseph Smith's translation of the Bible."[3]
These three complaints make a single accusation: that the Book of Mormon's Bible passages were copied straight out of the King James Bible Joseph Smith owned, mistakes, italics, and all. An ancient record translated by the gift of God should not read like one particular English Bible. If it does, the argument goes, then Joseph wrote the thing himself.
But the copying explanation falls apart as soon as you look at what the Book of Mormon actually does with the Bible, and at several points the text does things Joseph Smith had no way to fake.
The wording really does match
The Bible passages in the Book of Mormon, mostly long chapters of Isaiah, really do follow the wording of the King James Version. That much is not in dispute, and it should not be brushed aside.
But following the wording is not the same as copying the book. Picture how this would work if the translation really did come from God, for an American audience in 1829 who knew their scriptures in King James English. Where the ancient text on the plates matched the Isaiah those readers already had, the natural thing is to give it back to them in the language they knew, and to change the wording only where the ancient text actually said something different. That is exactly how scholars translated the Dead Sea Scrolls in our own day: where the ancient scroll agreed with the King James, they kept King James English about ninety percent of the time, and departed from it only where the scroll itself departed.[4] Inspired writers have always worked this way. The New Testament authors quoted an imperfect Greek translation of the Old Testament rather than stopping to correct it against the Hebrew.[5]
So King James wording in the Book of Mormon is what you would expect if the book is what it claims to be. The mistakes that rode along with that wording are the price of handing people a text in language they already trusted. (The CES Letter even overstates the detail. It calls these mistakes unique to the 1769 edition Joseph owned, but the same readings sit in the original 1611 printing too.[6] And its third complaint, that these verses should instead match Joseph's later revision of the Bible, assumes that revision was a word-for-word restoration. It was not. It was an inspired reworking and commentary, so there is no reason every verse should line up with it.[7]) The real question is what the Book of Mormon does beyond the King James, and that is where the copying story breaks.
The verse they lead with
The CES Letter opens with a single line from Isaiah, so we can start there too. In the King James Bible, Isaiah 2:16 warns against "all the ships of Tarshish," and the Book of Mormon quotes the verse the same way, Tarshish and all. That, the critics say, is the giveaway. Why would an ancient record match Joseph's own Bible word for word?
Here is what the argument leaves out. The oldest Greek copies of Isaiah, a translation made centuries before Christ, do not say "ships of Tarshish." They say "ships of the sea." Two ancient versions, two different lines, and for a long time scholars assumed one of them was simply a copyist's mistake. The Book of Mormon does something neither Bible does. It keeps both: "upon all the ships of the sea, and upon all the ships of Tarshish."[8]
That extra line is the trouble for the copying theory. It is not in the King James Bible Joseph owned. He could not read Greek, and the Greek version was not in circulation where he lived in 1829.[9] At the very verse the CES Letter holds up as proof that Joseph copied, the Book of Mormon preserves a reading he had no way to copy from. The likeliest explanation is that the original Isaiah carried both lines, each Bible we inherited later dropped one of them, and the Book of Mormon kept the whole thing.
A copy does not rewrite its own source
Step back and look at the scale of the changes. If Joseph were copying Isaiah out of his Bible, the chapters in the Book of Mormon should match the King James almost exactly. They do not. Three separate studies have counted the differences, and they all fall in the same range: the Book of Mormon alters the wording in roughly half of the Isaiah verses it quotes.[10][11] A forger copying a passage does not rewrite half of it.
The changes are not random, either. In a number of places where the Book of Mormon departs from the King James, it lines up instead with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known copies of Isaiah, written about 125 years before Christ and sealed in a cave until 1947, more than a century after the Book of Mormon was printed.[12] One change even reaches into the New Testament. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Book of Mormon leaves out the phrase "without a cause" that the King James includes, siding with the earliest Greek manuscripts, a reading modern scholars now think is probably the original, though they still argue about it.[13]
When Joseph wrote in his own voice
There is a simpler test that needs no manuscripts at all. If the Book of Mormon's old-fashioned English came out of Joseph Smith, then his own writing should sound the same way. It does not. When Joseph wrote in his own voice, like the short history he penned in 1832, he wrote plain, ordinary English for his time. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, is full of grammar and word meanings that had died out two hundred years before he was born, older in places than the King James Bible itself.[14] Whatever the source of that archaic language was, it was not Joseph's own way of writing. The book also carries Hebrew patterns of phrasing that the King James does not contain at all.[15]
Woven in, not pasted in
A copyist takes whatever sits in front of him. The Book of Mormon's prophets handle Isaiah like authors who know it by heart. Nephi does not quote Isaiah at random. He chooses the chapters that mirror his own family's story, a people driven out of Jerusalem and led through the wilderness, and he tells his readers outright that he picked them because they fit.[16] He even wraps the whole long stretch of Isaiah in a quiet pun on his own name. Nephi means "good" in Egyptian, and he opens the section writing of things that are "good" and closes it, chapters later, saying he has written them "for their good," a play on words that runs across three languages at once.[17] These are the moves of someone who understood Isaiah deeply and shaped it on purpose, not someone padding a forgery with Bible chapters.
The Isaiah dating problem
Most scholars believe that parts of Isaiah were written later than the rest, during Israel's exile in Babylon, which came after Lehi's family had already left Jerusalem with their scriptures. Yet some of those later-sounding chapters appear in the Book of Mormon, where, on that dating, they could not have been on the plates Lehi carried. The two most respected Latter-day Saint scholars of Isaiah both admit this is a genuine problem and that the usual quick answers are not strong enough.[18][19]
There are workable faithful responses. The earliest of that "later" material may have been written just before Lehi left, which closes most of the gap. And the Book of Mormon already shows God adding scripture after the fact: the risen Christ gives the Nephites words from the prophet Malachi, who lived long after Lehi was gone, so the same thing could account for a few later passages. These are honest possibilities rather than finished proofs, and a couple of the hardest cases are still open. The in-depth version walks through all of it, including the strongest case the critics have built and the companion pages on the italicized words and the Sermon on the Mount.
The seam, not the substance
It helps to remember how small this question is. Everything above concerns the six or seven percent of the Book of Mormon that quotes the Bible. The other ninety-odd percent has no King James parallel at all: its own history, its own geography that stays consistent across hundreds of pages, names with workable ancient roots, and the archaic language already mentioned. All of it was dictated out loud, start to finish, in about sixty working days, roughly 269,000 words, with no notes and no rewrites.[20]
The Bible-wording question has real edges, and we have not pretended otherwise. But it is a question about the seams of the Book of Mormon, not its substance. We began with one verse, 2 Nephi 12:16, that keeps a line no surviving Bible kept whole. The book that verse belongs to is not something Joseph Smith could have copied out of anything.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 1, p. 9. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," nos. 1-2, pp. 9-10. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 3, pp. 10-11. ↩︎
FAIR, "Isaiah and the Book of Mormon." Notes that Dead Sea Scrolls translators used KJV language for approximately 90% of the text where manuscripts agreed. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Isaiah_and_the_Book_of_Mormon ↩︎
New Testament authors frequently quoted the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) even where it diverged from the Hebrew original. For example, Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 using the Septuagint's parthenos ("virgin") rather than the Hebrew almah ("young woman"). This demonstrates that inspired authors working within a scriptural tradition used the available translation rather than independently correcting it against the original language. ↩︎
FAIR, "KJV Translation Errors in the Book of Mormon." The translation choices the CES Letter highlights exist identically in the 1611 KJV. The 1769 revision primarily standardized spelling, punctuation, and typesetting, made several hundred minor wording corrections, and extensively revised italicization. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/KJV_translation_errors_in_the_Book_of_Mormon ↩︎
Robert J. Matthews, "A Plainer Translation": Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible -- A History and Commentary (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1975). Foundational JST scholarship. Matthews described the JST as "an inspired revision of the King James Version" that includes "additions, deletions, rearrangements, and other forms of editing" -- not solely the recovery of lost original text. https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/plainer-translation-joseph-smiths-translation-bible-history-and-commentary ↩︎
Dana M. Pike and David R. Seely, "'Upon All the Ships of the Sea, and Upon All the Ships of Tarshish': Revisiting 2 Nephi 12:16 and Isaiah 2:16," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 2 (2005). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol14/iss2/4/ ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Joseph Smith's Awareness of Greek and Latin," in Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith and the Ancient World, ed. Lincoln H. Blumell, Matthew J. Grey, and Andrew H. Hedges (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2015), pp. 303-328. Documents Joseph's actual Greek and Latin study beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, after the Book of Mormon's 1829 completion. https://rsc.byu.edu/approaching-antiquity-joseph-smith-ancient-world/joseph-smiths-awareness-greek-latin ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, "Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon," in Isaiah and the Prophets, ed. Monte S. Nyman and Charles D. Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1984), pp. 165-178. Analyzed 234 variants: 59 favor the Book of Mormon, 126 neutral, 49 favor the KJV. https://rsc.byu.edu/isaiah-prophets/isaiah-variants-book-mormon ↩︎
Carol F. Ellertson, "The Isaiah Passages in the Book of Mormon: A Non-Aligned Text" (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 2001). Applied Emanuel Tov's textual criticism methodology to classify the Book of Mormon's Isaiah as an independent, non-aligned text. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4663/ ↩︎
Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, "Worthy of Another Look: The Great Isaiah Scroll and the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 20, no. 2 (2011): 78-80. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol20/iss2/7/ ↩︎
Stan Larson, "The Sermon on the Mount: What Its Textual Transformation Discloses Concerning the Historicity of the Book of Mormon," Trinity Journal 7, no. 1 (1986): 23-45. Larson identified eight Textus Receptus variants; the Book of Mormon follows the KJV/TR reading in seven cases but notably diverges at 3 Nephi 12:22 by omitting "without a cause" -- aligning with the earliest Greek manuscripts (P67, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus). ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter 25 (2017). Joseph's 1832 history shows modern English; the Book of Mormon's archaic features are not his personal style. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history ↩︎
Scripture Central KnoWhy, "Why Are There Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon?" Donald W. Parry: "the Book of Mormon's use of Hebraistic literary forms cannot simply be attributed to Joseph Smith's familiarity with the English Bible." https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-are-there-hebraisms-in-the-book-of-mormon ↩︎
S. Kent Brown, "What Is Isaiah Doing in First Nephi?" in From Jerusalem to Zarahemla (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1998), pp. 9-27. https://rsc.byu.edu/jerusalem-zarahemla/what-isaiah-doing-first-nephi-how-did-lehis-family-fare-so-far-home ↩︎
Matthew L. Bowen, "'For Their Good Have I Written Them': The Onomastic Allusivity and Literary Function of 2 Nephi 25:8," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 53 (2022): 77-90. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/for-their-good-have-i-written-them-the-onomastic-allusivity-and-literary-function-of-2-nephi-258 ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hardy concedes: "Recent Isaiah scholarship has moved...in favor of seeing the book of Isaiah as the product of several centuries of intensive redaction." Further: "even chapters 1-39 underwent considerable revision and augmentation after 600 BCE." Calls dismissal of scholars who "don't believe in prophecy" an "inadequate (and inaccurate) response." ↩︎
Joshua M. Sears, "Deutero-Isaiah in the Book of Mormon: Latter-day Saint Approaches," in They Shall Grow Together: The Bible in the Book of Mormon, ed. Charles Swift and Nicholas J. Frederick (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2022), pp. 365-392. https://rsc.byu.edu/they-shall-grow-together/deutero-isaiah-book-mormon ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 10-50. Welch concludes the translation occupied "57 to 63 available full-time working days." See also Welch's earlier overview in Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820-1844, ed. John W. Welch, 2nd ed. (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 2017). The dictation produced approximately 269,000 words with over 330 proper names maintained internally consistent and no substantive revisions. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/ ↩︎